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About this time every summer, I start experimenting with ice cream recipes. A few years ago, I tried to recreate a lime cilantro sorbet that I tried while at a conference. (Never got that one quite right.) Then there was the year that I had blueberry pie ice cream at Graeter’s, and spent the next several weeks figuring out how to make it. (Aced it and shared here!) This summer’s project: dark chocolate gelato.

When I was in Nafplio, Greece, earlier this summer, I had a wonderfully rich bowl of dark chocolate gelato while walking around a crowded nighttime square. It was darker than any gelato that I’ve had before, and it was hard to find a recipe that had enough chocolate depth to match. I finally had success with one from The Ciao Bella Book ofGelato & Sorbetto (a great gift from Laura a few years ago). And because dark chocolate gelato clearly isn’t decadent enough on its own, I borrowed the caramel sauce from this recipe and added a salted caramel ribbon. Enjoy! Fork and Spoon

The farmer’s markets are finally starting to sell fresh corn, and corn has also started appearing in my CSA box. I look forward to fresh corn all year and have a number of recipes ready to use it to it’s fullest potential.

I’ve already shared an amazing summer corn risotto, and there is always corn on the cob, but there are so many other amazing recipes out there that highlight fresh corn. Many recipes that call for corn as one of many ingredients, like a chili or even this cornbread, are just as good with frozen corn. So, in the summer I want a recipe that Fork and Spoon highlights the fresh corn in the best possible way, like this tasty skillet corn.

Now skillet corn can be made a variety of ways, and my favorite place to begin is with this amazing recipe from Eat. Drink. Smile. You add a little heavy cream that is absorbed by the corn, and I swear it is some of the best stuff you will ever put in your mouth.

That said, I often find myself without heavy cream and cilantro, but I want a dish with a similar flavor profile to their recipe. I played around a bit, kicked up some of the spices, and this spicy skillet corn was the result. Be warned: it is equally addicting!

What’s good for Australia is, of course, good for Michael Clarke. On an overcast day at Lord’s Australia’s batsmen cruised to tea and beyond, losing wickets at intervals, but with the air at all times of a team that has wrestled its opponent on to the living room carpet and is now simply feeling around patiently with its spare hand for the coal scuttle.

If Australia were in control there was one, isolated, note of discomfort. England may have been jostled into what already looks a losing position, but they will take some consolation from another jittery, oddly vulnerable innings from Australia’s captain, who now has scores of 38, four and seven in the series and has been dismissed each time in a most un-pup-like fashion: feet lagging, weight askew, ball offered up limply to the field.

An opposition will always clutch at any little fizzle of encouragement, but the exact timing and trajectory of Clarke’s future prospects from here is of just as much interest in his own country. What is certain is that Australia’s captain entered some time ago what we might call the Road Runner years, that period in the career of any much-decorated star player when what is holding them up is no longer form or future promise, but a kind of stalled, starry, declining momentum. Here he goes again: out beyond the cliff face, legs still pumping, eyes fixed grandly on the horizon.

Certainly Clarke has had a strange year and a half, a time of fractured, and then hastily resoldered, connections. His relationship with his own bosses and team-mates has been difficult. The relationship with his own body has been the most strained of all. What remains to be decided for Clarke is simply a divvying up of the end-game.

Australia’s captain knows he’s going. He even knows who’s coming into his place. What he wants now is simply to finish well, and on his own terms. Ideally this would involve a World Cup – tick – and a first Ashes win in England. What seems clear now is that if he is to manage the second of these, Clarke will be driving this team from the rear; Australia’s power as a batting unit being steered by the man whose heightened status over the past two years has helped frame his own exit.

Steve Smith’s double hundred here was beautifully compiled, a restlessly fluent innings that has driven this Australia team through the opening two days of this Lord’s Test. Smith is now pushing Don Bradman as a first-innings run machine over the past two years. Clarke, meanwhile, is lurking just behind the now-departed Shane Watson in terms of average and runs scored since the start of the Perth Test on the previous Ashes tour.

Since then 24 innings have brought two dogged, zombified, hundreds, no fifties and 19 scores below 25. Of more concern is the sense of entropy in Clarke’s batting, the draining away of that vital quick-footed puppery. Some old-stagers can linger on, nature’s curmudgeons, those who have always batted with a senior’s gait. Old, glowering, mustachioed Graham Gooch and mid-career glowering mustachioed Graham Gooch were essentially the same thing. Steve Waugh was always Steve Waugh right from the start, the most fogeyish of tyros; always baggy, never green.

Clarke on the other hand needs to bat like a young man to bat well. His style, even as his body fails a little, is unhelpfully youthful, like a man in the advanced stages of mid-life hair loss who still insists on gelling into a quiff his thinning fringe. Clarke will continue to twinkle, if only dimly, as he did here in the course of a probing early spell from Stuart Broad. England’s tactics were clear: threaten to bounce Clarke, Alastair Cook whistling up a short leg straight away, then bowl full and make him try to play like he used to.

Twice Clarke went for big, wafty, anchored drives to full deliveries. Mark Wood drew a loop up off the bat shoulder from a short delivery, and next ball not so much a dismissal as a euthanising from the crease. Clarke had seven. He was in no real position to play a hook shot. But still he hooked, straight to Gary Ballance close to the square leg umpire.

It was an oddly jarring note. The tourists have won pretty much every battle so far during a Test that is, right now, heading only one way. Most heartening will be the sense of a team being powered by its component parts, the strength in that top three and the excellent English-style lengths found by the bowlers in the final hour, a credit to three days of intelligent planning since Cardiff.

Smith, meanwhile, continues to fill the skies. His 200 here was reached with another glide through the off-side, and celebrated helmet off, arms aloft. On the balcony Australia’s players applauded in formation. In the press box there were shouts and cheers from the calm, neutral hands of the Australian press corps. This was a chanceless, unorthodox, but still somehow beautifully correct innings, the ball making a lovely crack off his bat as those wrists snapped down, foot planted across, back reproachfully straight. Even his dismissal was commendably funky, lbw reverse-sweeping Joe Root.

Water Bottles Clarke’s declaration on 566-8, executed from the balcony with a classic, disdainful backward wave, had a theatrically assertive quality. Not that any real captaincy was needed as Australia’s bowlers were brilliantly incisive, bowling fast and straight, and shifting the gravity of this series in the space of 10 overs as England whimpered their way to 30 for four.

Full-time stats show comfortable possession and key area dominance for the visitors – 58 – 42 % possession for Liverpool with 25-odd shots (8 on target) besting the Roar’s two.

Still, Brendan Rodgers wouldn’t have enjoyed watching the Roar take that early lead, and you feel there might be a few players doing extra hill sprints next training session (presuming 1980s park league training methods are still in practice on Merseyside).

Roar showing glimpses of their fine short-passing game, which will no doubt make Aloisi happy, but a lot more to come, especially at the pointy end, if they’re to take the fight to the Victory’s and Sydney FCs of the league.

Thanks as always for your emails and tweets – we’ll have more live coverage tomorrow night as Manchester City take on Melbourne City.

“Everybody be cool, this a robbery!” So might Darren Lehmann holler as he brandishes his weapon and leaps onto a table in the Long Room at Lord’s. OK, perhaps he climbs gradually onto that table. You don’t imagine the Australia coach does a lot of leaping these days. Nor does he threaten to execute anything but plans. But it’s alright. The diners will wait.

In fact, maybe the whole enterprise is more laid-back than a typical Tarantino opener. If you want to wind your pulp culture back another decade, you might find that the t-shirts of the Australian cricket entourage read Darren Says Relax. Or they would, if the space hadn’t already been sold to sponsors.Yoga Water Bottles

There is a feel of inevitability about Hillary Clinton becoming the next President of the United States. We very well could be just 18 months from our first female president.

But there are two very real problems with this assumption. One, there was a feeling of inevitability about her eight years ago and, if you consider yourself to be up on the happenings in Washington DC, you’ll note she is not Travel Bottles currently president. And, two, the Republican Party is only now unveiling their secret weapon: NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

Yes, the man who earned countless headlines over the past 12 months for his incompetent and tone-deaf corporate leadership – and consider how hard it is to stand out in the crowded incompetent and tone-deaf world of corporate leadership – is spending this week advising Republican elected officials.

On Monday, Republican House whip Steve Scalise hosted Goodell in a closed door meeting with fellow legislators who were invited to learn at the feet of the great Rog. On Tuesday, House Republican Conference Chairman Cathy McMorris hosted a lunch with 40 colleagues to hear “leadership lessons” from Goodell. The commissioner will also meet with GOP staffers. Yes. You can take a moment to read back over all those sentences that just hurt your brain, but unfortunately the facts won’t change: people elected to run the world’s most powerful country are seeking out advice from Roger Goodell. The NFL commissioner. Roger Goodell. Yes. Him.

But, really, why shouldn’t they get advice from Goodell? He has failed at everything except making more money for his most important constituents (the NFL owners), and despite his countless missteps, remains very much in power – and very wealthy, with an income of $44.2m a year. Making bad decisions, serving only the power brokers who put you in office, yet consolidating power and growing your wealth? That right there is the American (Politician) Dream. Roger Goodell is the hero of Capitol Hill.

The commissioner shouldn’t stop with simply advising the GOP, however – he should look to takeover the whole thing. His father, Charles Goodell, was a US representative and senator from New York from 1959 to 1971. Goodell has politics in his blood. And if Donald Trump – a disgusting, reality show buffoon, can be near the top of the field – why couldn’t Goodell be the frontrunner? Current No1 Jeb Bush has name recognition, but so does Goodell, and – unlike Jeb – he’s not closely associated with the unpopular George W Bush. (He is with Daniel Snyder, though, so maybe it’s a draw there.)